


Smoke

by tabbycat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23584411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabbycat/pseuds/tabbycat
Summary: “The end of days comes. The end of the Dark Lord and the end of the man who fights him. A smoke will rise and a man with it, and they will be what defeats the world.”Sirius Black meets Rolanda Hooch in the hope she’ll help him solve his problem. Maybe she will. Maybe there’s something else entirely going on.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Rolanda Hooch
Comments: 20
Kudos: 20
Collections: Sing Me a Rare: The Mash-Ups





	Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sing-Me-A-Rare: Mash Ups. Much love to my alpha enniferfs, who convinced me this made at least some sense!
> 
> Song Prompts - Last Night On Earth (Green Day), Black Cat (Mayday Parade)

It starts with an entirely different prophecy.

There’s a world somewhere, or there is if you believe in it, where a man named Severus Snape overhears half a prophecy about a boy, a boy who can bring down the Dark Lord. A parallel universe, perhaps. Not here, at the least.

But this story isn’t about that.

A man walks into a bar, yes, like the jokes that start that way, except this isn’t a joke. A man walks into a bar, an entirely different man, and he hears something else entirely. An entirely different woman speaks entirely different sentences.

_“The end of days comes. The end of the Dark Lord and the end of the man who fights him. A smoke will rise and a man with it, and they will be what defeats the world.”_

It makes no sense to our man. He reports it to his master nonetheless. And the Dark Lord sends his minions, his flying monkeys, out to the world to look for the smoke, look for the man, look for the threats and to bring them down. He knows how that ended for Grindelwald, but perhaps he doesn’t learn his lessons. Perhaps he thinks he’s above such failure. 

This story isn’t about the Dark Lord, either.

And it isn’t about the man that doesn’t hear it. Albus Dumbledore is a lot of things, and clever is certainly one of them. He doesn’t have minions, flying monkeys, followers. He calls them friends. They act not out of fear but of something else entirely, and so Albus Dumbledore thinks, for once, he has the upper hand.

Maybe he does.

We’ll see.

Voldemort has disappeared.The Death Eaters are divided; without a master, they don’t seem to be capable of half the chaos they had been. One by one, the Ministry rounds them up and puts them on trial. There’s no big moment where the war is won, but, one day, there isn’t a war any more.

And Sirius Black doesn’t believe it.

He’s fighting a war of his own now, and it’s a war against his own side. It’s a war against James, who thinks this is it, it’s all over, he can live with his wife and his baby happily ever after. It’s a war against Remus, who’s jaded and stuck in a mire of the realisation that he isn’t accepted in the society he tried to save. It’s a war against everyone but Peter, who’s certain that Voldemort will return, and one of Lily’s friends, Rolanda, who, frankly, Sirius has never taken the first bit of notice of before.

“I believe you,” she says. “I believe you that something’s going to happen.”

Sirius shrugs her off at first, because she’s one of the first people he speaks to, and at this point, he’s certain it’s merely James who’s an idiot and Remus who’s a pessimist, and that everyone’s going to agree with her anyway. They don’t. They want to go to the fucking pub. So he looks for her again.

“You believe me,” he says.

“I don’t think You-Know-Who is coming back,” she says. “It’s something far worse.”

“What?” Even Sirius has no patience for conspiracy theories. Rolanda’s sister runs the fucking Quibbler.

“An Obscurus.”

“Okay.” 

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

He doesn’t.

And then all of a sudden he does. It’s three things that make Sirius believe her, three things that come on the heels of one another late one night, as Sirius stalks the streets of East London. He’s trying to get his head straight, so he walks. Around him people shuffle about their everyday lives; lairy men on their way from the pub to the club, a group of giggling girls making the same journey, a homeless man begging, a fox. Sirius gives a pound to the homeless bloke and ignores the rest. One of the girls, wearing a fucking leotard, invites him to join them.

He thinks that there’s less likely things that could be going on.

It’s six weeks after Voldemort’s disappearance, and Sirius is asleep when there’s a crashing noise downstairs. He’s not so out of practice at war that he doesn’t remember to grab his wand before he goes down the stairs, and not so stupid that he doesn’t cast a charm to silence the sounds of his feet and another to mask his shadow. 

He almost hexes James.

“Bloody hell,” says James, glasses crooked, a foot from the Floo. “Bloody hell, Sirius, it’s me!”

“Prove it,” Sirius snarls. 

James looks like he’s going to resist, and Sirius doesn’t lower his wand, but James proves who he is. They sit at the table, Sirius puts the kettle on, they spend five minutes pretending this is a social call. Because to do anything else would be for James to admit that the war isn’t as over as he’s been saying it is.

“Dumbledore’s dead,” James says, finally. “Moody appeared on my doorstep half an hour ago. Sent me to pass on the news.”

“Where else have you been?” 

“Came here first.”

“Shit,” says Sirius. “Dead?”

“Moody saw it himself. They were ambushed by Voldemort’s supporters. One of them was Snape. His mask fell off in the fight, but he got away. Rabastan Lestrange is dead. None of the others were identified, but they wore the masks and the robes.”

“Shit,” says Sirius, again.

“Yeah.”

“Why?” Sirius knows why.

“Dunno. Probably an act of retribution.There’s no proof Dumbledore was involved in Voldemort’s disappearance, none at all, but I don’t think that matters to them.”

James believes the Ministry’s interpretation of Voldemort’s disappearance. A dark ritual gone wrong. Aurors, Frank Longbottom included, had tracked his last whereabouts to an old manor house in an obscure, Muggle village, where he seemed to have died surrounded by the paraphernalia needed to make a Horcrux. All the papers had run articles. Sales of Horcrux ritual supplies had spiked, then been placed on restricted lists.

“Don’t be a conspiracy theorist,” James warns.

But something’s off. Something’s fake about all of this, or it looks that way to Sirius, anyway. It isn’t that he thinks James isn’t telling the truth, that Moody isn’t. It isn’t that he thinks Dumbledore isn’t dead, or Voldemort hadn’t disappeared. It simply isn’t that he thinks this is the whole story.

But where does he go from there? Sirius has nothing but to go to one of the two people still willing to listen to his conspiracy theories: Peter, or Lily’s friend Rolanda. Peter’s not home when Sirius apparates to his house and raps on the door, rapidly, four times, and Sirius doesn’t want to wait. He doesn’t know where she lives. His wand sends a Patronus, and he apparates on to the Leaky, where he’s halfway into a pint of mead before she shows up. 

“What is this?” she asks, as she slides onto the bench next to him. “Is this a date?”

“No.” It isn’t that he wouldn’t mind a date with her. She’s conventionally attractive, after all, with long dark hair that she wears in a plait down her back most of the time, but tonight is loose around her face and shoulders. Her eyes are brown, the sort of eyes that make you want to trust someone. “I mean - I’ve got something I wanted to talk to you about. I didn’t mean that to sound harsh.”

Rolanda raises an eyebrow. “The invitation was misleading.”

“Yeah. I see that. It’s just - fuck - you might be the only person that believes me.”

He’s surprised by her reaction to that. Almost immediately she stands up, glaring down at him from her not-insignificant height.

“I don’t believe just anything.”

“No, that isn’t what I meant, sit down, I mean, if you want to, look, it’s about - it’s about everything that’s going on. Voldemort. Dumbledore. You think there’s an Obscurus.

She sits. “Go on.”

“I think you’re right.”

Nothing in her face visibly softens, and the hard set of her shoulders doesn’t, either, but Sirius thinks she isn’t offended any more, all the same. She flattens her hair and glares at him.

“This better not be you trying to get laid.”

“What?”

“You’d be surprised,” she says, as if that answers everything. Maybe it does. “If you believe in it, what are you going to do about it?”

“What?” Sirius picks up the beer mat and twiddles it around in his hands. “I don’t know.”

He’d hoped she might. 

“I’m not here to solve all your problems, you know.”

“No. You’re not. Can you help, though?”

She eyes him from under her fringe. She’s got a truly impressive amount of hair, Sirius thinks, and there’s a second for which he wants to reach out and touch it. See if it’s as soft as it looks. 

“I don’t think we should discuss this here,” Rolanda says, after a while. She gets up, swishing her cloak on over her shoulders. “Come on,” she adds, when he doesn’t stand. “Do you want my help or not?”

“Obviously,” he says, but he gets up, anyway. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Plenty of people ask for advice who don’t actually intend to take it. They just hope to hear they’re right.”

“Well,” says Sirius as they leave, “I’ve got no idea what’s going on, so I’m fairly certain I’m not right.”

“Sounds like the best place to start from.” Just as they get to a few feet from the door, someone grabs her arm. Sirius goes to pull his wand from his pocket. 

“Excuse me,” says the bloke, a burly man in his mid-fifties, “can I have your autograph?”

Rolanda signs the offered piece of parchment, then six or seven more for the wizard’s friends. A couple of them pose for a photograph. Sirius waits. One of them punches him on the arm and calls him a lucky bastard.

“Do you follow Quidditch?” Rolanda asks.

“Sometimes.” He did, before Voldemort. Maybe he should start again.

“I play for the Harpies,” she says, tossing her hair out of her eyes as the wind hits them outside. “Hence that. I don’t enjoy it.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

Somehow that makes things awkward, and Sirius isn’t quite sure why. They walk half a mile in no particular direction, through a London that’s winding down from the working day and not quite yet geared up for the night. Sirius’ jeans and boots blend right in, and her cloak looks enough like a coat that nobody bats an eyelid as they pass. They don’t speak.

“Where should we talk about it?” Sirius finally asks, and Rolanda stops in her tracks. 

“Oh, wherever you like, now.”

“What?”

“You should probably listen,” she suggests.

They talk for hours. He’s not sure where he’s going with any of what he’s saying, or he isn’t at the beginning, but he thinks, by the end, he’s forming a coherent narrative. She listens. They walk, they walk fucking miles, and by the time Sirius has got to the point where he’s run out of things to say his feet ache, and his legs, and she’s still watching him, listening to him, like he’s the most interesting thing in the world.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“Your brother isn’t an Obscurus,” she says, bluntly, and Sirius feels his ego squash. “Your brother is dead.”

“How do you know?” Sirius bristles. Regulus might not be dead. Nobody ever found a body, did they, and without a body, there’s no conclusive proof. She ought to know that, even if nobody else does. 

“I do.” She sighs. “Come on. My feet ache.”

They find seats in a small, dirty takeaway, which later in the night will be frequented by people who’ve had far too much to drink. They buy chips. Sirius casts a Muffilato as surreptitiously as he can.

“Dead people stay dead,” she says, and that’s all she’ll say on the matter. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” she continues. “But there’s a prophecy. And it doesn’t point at your brother.”

Sirius has always taken prophecy to be a bogus art.

“Yeah,” he says, “and I’m signing as a Beater for the Wasps.”

“I’d have heard if you were. You’re being obstructive.”

“Sarcastic.” He’s fairly sure, based on just that exchange alone, that she doesn’t understand sarcasm. “I’m sarcastic.”

“Well, it doesn’t become you.” She’s ordered her chips with gravy, which Sirius privately thinks is an abomination, and she pokes at the gravy with a chip. “I know about it, that’s all I’m going to say.”

“Fine.” He considers stealing some of her gravy. “How did you get into professional Quidditch?”

Rolanda raises an eyebrow, but explains. They finish their chips, walk some more. 

“You know,” she says, as she leans over a railing, looking down onto the Thames, as the sky begins to lighten behind her, “I’m due at the pitch in two hours.”

“Why are you still here?” The question comes out worse than Sirius means it, more accusing. He’s actually just curious. They’ve not actually talked about this theory of his for hours. “I mean, why stay?”

“I like you,” she says, and plants a kiss on his cheek. With that, she’s gone.

They meet again entirely unexpectedly, some three days later. Sirius has, even by his own standards, got himself into slightly more trouble than he can safely get himself out of. He’s running around a corner when he sees Rolanda, firmly grasping another man’s arm, laughing and giggling at whatever it is the idiot’s saying. And even Sirius admits that now’s not the time for jealousy, because he’s being pursued, but he feels a stab of it all the same. 

Much to his surprise, the footsteps following him around the next corner aren’t that of his enemies. Well, they are, but they’re also hers. She flattens him against a wall, grasping his wand hand by the wrist so he can barely cast a spell, and then they’re sliding along the wall together and into an alcove. Sirius has a flash of inspiration, possibly entirely based on what she’s clearly attempting, and manages to charm his hair blonde, like the bloke she’d been with, before Death Eaters skid around the corner and her mouth is over his. One hand pins his wrist to the wall and the other disappears into his hair, and he finds himself more than willing to go along with this. The Death Eaters disappear, she pulls away with a grin, and Sirius hopes the entirely inappropriate erection he’s sprouted isn’t as visible as he thinks it is.

It absolutely is, unfortunately.

“Try not to need rescuing,” Rolanda says, in a tone that Sirius thinks is supposed to be lightly mocking. But there’s something about her wide eyes, her still slightly parted lips, the way her breathing is ever so slightly heavier than it should be, and how she’s barely moved away from him. Something about all of that hints that she’d quite like him to need rescuing again.

“My place, next time?” he tries. 

She stalks off, and throws him a look back over her shoulder with a grin and a gesture with her middle finger.

“Who the fuck are you?” he mutters, and Apparates. Perhaps a better question would be: why the hell does he care?

Within the week she’s knocking at his front door.

“Oh, Lily told me where you live,” Rolanda says, when Remus opens the door. “Not you,” she says to him. “Sirius.”

“I’ll leave,” Remus says, and grins. Sirius considers tripping him as he goes for his cloak, but settles for putting a colour change charm on the milk.

“So I looked into things,” she says, without much preamble aside from flirting with the slightly baffled Remus as he leaves, “and I’m not sure what this points to at all. And I’m messing with him, by the way. I’m far more interested in you.”

“What?” says Sirius. He isn’t bad with witches, in fact, he’s always been fairly good with them, but something about Rolanda that throws him off. He feels like he’s permanently three steps behind her. 

“I said what I said.” 

“Oh. Anyway. You were saying?”

“I was saying that I fancy you. I thought that much was obvious.”

Sirius manages to restrain himself from saying ‘oh’ or ‘what’, which he feels is a step forwards, but sort of ruins the whole thing anyway by making a noise that he thinks might be halfway between ‘really?’ and ‘what?’.

“No. I’m having you on. I’m only here to get you to ask your mate out for me.” She’s still standing in the middle of the room, and Sirius sort of ineffectively pats the sofa in an attempt to suggest she sits down. “You know, I feel like your intelligence was something that attracted me to you.” Rolanda sits. “So. Evil spirits rising from the east.”

“Who said anything about the east?” Sirius has to fucking focus. She’s so distracting. Everything about her, from the hair she’s once again letting fly loose (maybe he has a thing for hair?), the way her dress flatters her tits, the grin, her legs, everything’s fucking distracting him. 

“Evil always rises in the east. Voldemort. Grindelwald.” She pauses.

“If you’re in Russia then all that evil’s risen in the west. Besides, Nixon.”

Rolanda laughs, and Sirius feels some sort of victory.

“Perhaps it’s relative,” she says. “Anyway, focus. We’ve got things to do, and then we’re going to focus on solving them problem of whatever evil rises from whatever cardinal direction it chooses, relative to wherever we choose to be.”

“Well,” says Sirius, “how about the direction we choose is my bedroom?” It’s a terrible line, and it doesn’t make sense, but she takes his offered hand and they half-run into his room, unable to stop for long enough to shut the door. She pulls at his t-shirt, and Sirius lifts his arms obligingly, so she can pull it off and run her hands up and down his chest admiringly. It’s his turn now, but Sirius knows his manners.

“May I?” he asks, his hands pausing on the zip at the back of her dress.

“By all means,” Rolanda says, and seconds later her dress pools on the floor.

There’s very little time for talking after that. Discussion seems unimportant. They shag, that’s the best word Sirius can come up with for the way they desperately need to fuck, they laze on Sirius’ bed whispering in a disjointed way about her Quidditch career, his attempts at gaining work, and absolute rubbish in between, and then they’re back to fucking. To begin with, the sun streams in through curtains Sirius didn’t bother to close, then darkness. The passage of time ceases to matter.

“It’s too early,” she says, “but I love you.”

“Fuck.” Doesn’t matter if he says what he thinks then. “Fucking hell. I love you too.” He runs his hands through her hair, like he’s been wanting to do for a week. It’s as beautiful as he expected. His hands skim over her shoulders and breasts. He can go again, he thinks, for her.

He’s never loved a girl before, not properly, not like this.

They just fit. It isn’t just the sex. It never was, because, Sirius thinks, this didn’t start when they shagged, or even when they kissed. It started when they’d sat in the Leaky (she’d said she hoped he wasn’t just trying to get laid, which, of course, he hadn’t been then), or maybe when she’d first said she believed him, that something else was going wrong. It’s something more than just the sex. They sit together, as well, Sirius and Rolanda, and they run through the ills of the wizarding world and they’re going to set it right. The two of them. Together.

“The smoke rises,” she repeats, and Sirius doesn’t understand that, but he also doesn’t much care.

They ride his motorcycle down the streets of London, faster than they should be, faster than it’s probably safe to go. Rolanda screams as he turns a corner too fast, but he’s good at driving this thing, he knows how it works. He skids a little longer than he needs to, and she laughs in his ear. 

“I love you,” she says, and he almost misses it on the wind.

“I love you,” he says, settling himself onto a branch of the tree they’ve climbed in Hyde Park. 

“I love you,” he promises, as they sit and watch the sun rise over the city from Primrose Hill. He pulls her closer. “I’d do anything for you. Anything. It’s yours. I’d give you my heart if I could.”

She smiles, kisses him on the cheek. “I love you too.”

They decide that the world might end. They explore London, roaming the streets and parks and landmarks until dawn, and they spend an equal amount of nights in his flat, or hers, surrounded by crumbling parchments and dusty books and brand new scribbled notes. She repeats a phrase about smoke. Sirius writes it down. The world might end, but they can save it, and even if it does, Sirius has her.

“What do we do?” Rolanda asks, leaning out of the window to her flat, out over another sunrise. He’s next to her, swigging from a bottle of some horrific beer. They fit together in the window perfectly, an inch or less of space either side of them and none in between. “What do we do if we can’t stop whatever’s coming?”

“I don’t know,” Sirius admits. “I don’t need to know. Not if I’m with you.”

“That’s…” she begins, and laughs when she sees his face, for some reason. “That’s enough to you, isn’t it?”

“I love you. There’s never going to be anyone else,” he says “There couldn’t be. Nobody like you.”

“Never going to be anyone like you, either.” 

He pulled her in. "I love you,” he repeats, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

And Sirius didn’t know why it felt like saying goodbye forever.

“Even if we lose everything,” he says, “I love you.”

—

I suppose we digress. This isn’t so much a love story, as, well, you’ll see. Here we have the end of act one, I suppose. The end of the part where they fall in love, and the beginning of the part where, it transpires, love doesn’t conquer all.

If you like your tale to end happily ever after, perhaps this is where you stop.

—

Sirius doesn’t like to say ‘I told you so’ to his friends, but, honestly, he did tell them so. He doesn’t find that very comforting, however. There’s something wrong, there’s been something wrong for months, and none of them had been willing to see it.

He’s not even sure they see it now, and Mad-Eye’s been murdered.

“He’s dead,” says James.“Murdered.” Words are important. Mad-Eye’s been murdered.

“You’ve not got proof,” says James. And no, Sirius hasn’t, but he’s going to find it, as certain as anything.

And even if James thinks this is another isolated incident, Rolanda agrees with Sirius. They pore over maps, documents, anything they can find that link murders, suspicious deaths or disappearances, mapping which side of the war they were on. The Order dies, they notice. The Death Eaters disappear. It’s assumed that there’s a faction of disgruntled Death Eaters killing Order members, and that it’s likely to be the ones that have disappeared. They’ve gone underground through their own choice.

“It isn’t,” says Rolanda. “It can’t be.”

And Sirius thinks she’s right, even though there’s no proof. There’s a lot of things, however, that don’t add up, that and a referenced prophecy.

“Why are you reading books on Divination?” Remus asks, picking a tome up to hover two inches off it’s pile before dropping it in a cloud of page-dust and disdain. “You didn’t even take it at OWL because, and I quote, it’s a load of bollocks for witches.”

“Well,” says Sirius, nose deep in a book about Obscuruses, because that’s still their primary theory, “that was a sexist assumption. Maybe I’m trying to broaden my horizons. You know, grow as a person.”

Remus mutters something about growing a person horizontally if he’s not careful about contraceptive charms. Sirius doesn’t find that helpful. 

“Besides,” says Remus, “there’s critical evidence it’s all a load of bollocks.”  
Sirius puts a mild hex on the teabags when Remus isn’t looking.

But they’re not getting anywhere. Tensions slowly rise in the wizarding world again. The truce, always tenuous, always prone to scuffles outside of pubs and tensions at the Ministry, begins to break. 

“The deaths aren’t the modus operandi of the Death Eaters,” Rolanda says, pacing Sirius’ bedroom in only one of his old t-shirts and her own knickers. Sirius won’t let them discuss this sort of thing naked. “They’re different. Less measured.” 

They leave behind a trail of destruction. The disappearances, too. Too matter the official line, there’s no sign any of these people left of their own free will. It looks like a hurricane has hit, like something has torn the world around it apart.

“Don’t you have a practice?” he asks, as Rolanda lies stretched out on the sofa on her stomach, frantically scribbling onto parchment. Sirius is pacing, his feet tracing a circle on the rug as he reads. “Shit. It started an hour ago.”

“This is more important,” she says. 

“Really?”

“How many practices do you think there’ll be if the world ends?” she asks, rolling over onto her side. “Just at a guess? Maybe armageddon will allow three a week?”

“Even Death Eaters enjoy Quidditch, I suppose.”

“Exactly. Even the end of days stops for sport.” Rolanda sighs. “I’ll Floo them later and say I was ill. There’s another tomorrow, and we could run a few drills later?”

“Good idea.” He flops into the armchair. “There’s other forms of exercise we could take, too.”

“Well,” she says, with a grin, “the end of the world might stop for that, too.”

It makes sense, all of it, until it doesn’t. It makes sense until Sirius finds himself faced once again with pursing Death Eaters, and not that he isn’t used to this, not that this hasn’t been a staple part of his life since maybe the age of sixteen, but it niggles at him. Something’s not right. This - the idea they’re chasing him - it doesn’t fit with their theory.

“Why not?” says Rolanda, when he mentions it. “There’s more to everything than one explanation.”

Sirius shrugs. “But you have to admit,” he says, “it fits better with the Ministry interpretation than our own.”

“Maybe that’s what they want you to think.”

The doorbell rings. Remus and James and Peter and Lily and Marlene all file in, Sirius has entirely forgotten they were supposed to be coming around, and he can’t raise this argument again with them present. He can’t. They all think he’s ridiculous anyway. They tell him so regularly, in the guise of tough love, and we miss you, and why don’t you come to the pub any more? They think he’s going mad. They think they’re safe.

They pursue thinking that when Emmeline Vance is found dead. They’re thinking what they thought in the war, when it was Voldemort they fought; we’ll be okay, we’ll be fine, these things don’t happen to us. Only Peter admits a tiny bit of fear. 

Sirius isn’t sure he’s afraid. He thinks he is, to begin with, but it doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like he’s gripped by something, that he’s either immobilised with it or unable to stay still for a second. Rolanda understands. She’s the only one that does. They flit between inaction and frantic activity together, the two of them, and it’s weeks before Sirius realises the only people he’s seen are her and Remus, and the latter only because they live together. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Remus asks, twice a day. 

Sirius is fine. It’s the rest of the world that isn’t.

“Do you need to see a Healer?” Remus asks, bluntly, blocking Sirius into the kitchen by placing himself in the doorway between Sirius and the exit. “Lily says she knows a good one.”

Remus, and Lily, are insinuating madness. Half Sirius’ family have gone mad, one point or another. Grimmauld Place, if rumours are right, is just his mother and his grandfather now, rattling round becoming increasingly mad. But Sirius isn’t then. He isn’t insane. He’s fine.

They’re both fine.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Rolanda says. They’ve both got the habit of pacing the room, now, taking it in turns to look like they don’t understand, taking it in turns to be the calm one on the sofa. Sirius is perched there at the moment, and she walks a fine line between books and bowls and cups and a pile of haphazard blankets on her tiptoes. “There’s no pattern.”

“We found patterns.” But that’s the problem. They’ve found so many. 

“The smoke rises,” she says, again.

“What does that mean?”

She doesn’t know. Rolanda has an explanation for everything, or always seemed to, and she doesn’t have one for that. It’s like the phrase is a talisman she carries, something that she hopes will protect her from what she thinks is going to come. 

“What does it mean?” Sirius asks, again, more to himself than to her. He isn’t expecting her to pick up a book and throw it at the wall, with a scream that cuts through the air. Sirius leaps from the sofa to try and calm her, but she’s already calmer, standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by pages of exploded book, shaking, her eyes wide like she can’t believe what she’s done.

“I don’t,” she said, her voice quivering, “I don’t know. I didn’t mean that. I didn’t want to.”

“We should take a break,” Sirius says, mumbling it into her ear as he steers her towards the sofa, arms wrapped around her as firmly as he can. “Let’s just not think about this tonight. Alright? Just a little bit of a break.” He leads her into the kitchen, tries to make dinner, and she sits at the kitchen table looking vacant. Scared. They’re both fine, he thinks. They’ve just pushed themselves too far. Look at what OWLs drive people to.

“It’s going to be alright,” he promises. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Rolanda says. They’re fine, Sirius thinks, they’re fine.

Sirius remembers half the charms from making the Map, and he pulls the other half, frankly, out of thin air as he sets traps. He’s going to be here the moment someone else from the Order is targeted, and he’ll be able to see it for himself. That’s the sensible solution. It’s slightly dangerous, he supposed, but no more than most of what he’s done before.

Rolanda’s out when one goes off, at Quidditch, he thinks, although it’s hazy, and Sirius lets the magic he’s set Apparate him to where he needs to go. It probably takes three seconds, if that, but he messes up the landing, that, or a spell’s off, because the instant he arrives he’s thrown backwards. Maybe it’s someone else’s curse. The street is dark, artificially dark, because he can’t see further than three feet through a thick black fog. Snape knew a curse for that sort of thing, he remembers. Death Eaters.

He’s too late. Sirius doesn’t want to know who’s died. He’s too late, he hasn’t seen anything, he doesn’t understand any more than he did. A dead end.

By the time he gets home, she’s back, sitting in the dark for some reason. Her wand sparks with colours, red, blue, yellow, green, and she stares at them like they’re a firework display.

“How was Quidditch?” he asks. He doesn’t say anything about where he’s been. There’s a fine layer of dust on most of him, he’s ruffled and looks like he’s been through a fight, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Rolanda?”

“I’m not playing for them anymore,” she says, slamming her wand down on the coffee table, making the stack of books wobble with the force of it. “They don’t understand.”

“They don’t understand what?”

“That there’s things more important than Quidditch.”

Sirius can’t deny that.

“When did you quit?”

“I don’t know. A week ago? Can’t remember.”

“Oh. Okay. Do you want dinner?”

“Only if you’re making something anyway.”

“I love you,” he says. Rolanda doesn’t respond.

The next alarm goes off the night afterwards, and Sirius stumbles from sleep into a familiar place. Godric’s Hollow is full of smoke and that dark dust that clings to every aspect of his clothes, and, once again, Sirius can’t get close enough to see what’s going on until there’s nothing left to see except smoke and Lily, screaming, clutching baby Harry to her chest. Sirius doesn’t know which way to run. Backwards, forwards, away from all of this, towards his best friend.

James is dead.

Sirius talks to the Aurors. He doesn’t know what happened. He was coming to visit a friend. Yes, in the middle of the night. They’re practically brothers. He lies, because he says James alerted him with the mirror. He’s released. There’s a black dust all over the path, and smoke in the air.

And James is dead, James isn’t supposed to be dead, and Sirius isn’t supposed to have to be the hero. Sirius isn’t supposed to have to fix this. 

Rolanda’s sitting on the doorstep to his flat when Sirius gets home. She leaps up and flies at him, almost knocking him backwards despite her size compared to him, burying her face into his shoulder.  
“I thought you were dead!” she shouts, her voice reverberating off the landing walls. “I didn’t - I heard about what happened, and you weren’t here, and… oh!” 

“I’m okay,” he says, reaching in his pocket around her for the key and trying to get them both inside. This isn’t something that can play out on the doorstep. It isn’t a wizarding flat block. James is dead and he’s thinking about the Statute of Secrecy. “I’m alive.” James isn’t.

“I’m going to kill them,” he promises. “Whoever did this, I’m going to kill them.”

"You're going to do something stupid.”

The accusation hangs in the air, like a firework on a timing spell.

“I’m not,” Sirius lies. “I’m going to make it right.”

“Right could be any number of things,” she says, then stops. Her eyes go wide and her hands grip his arm like a vice. “This isn’t a game,” she says, suddenly. “It isn’t a game, Sirius.”

“I know that.” It isn’t a game, no, but it feels like less than reality. A smokescreen divides him from the real world, him and her together, a barrier beyond which there are things that aren’t any of this. Where there isn’t some sort of threat, where there isn’t any more danger than the sort he understands, where there isn’t this niggling feeling that he’s got it all wrong. Terribly wrong. “I just - you have to see. I have to make this right.”

“How?” She’s still gripping his arm. “How are you going to make it right, Sirius? You don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do. We can’t fix this until we work it out, until we understand!”

He’s going to do something stupid.

It’s his turn to become obsessive, and even Remus doesn’t try to stop him. Sirius can’t remember when he last saw Remus. He thinks Remus still lives in the flat, but it isn’t clear. This isn’t his flat, he then realises, this is Rolanda’s flat, and that’s why Remus doesn’t live here. He’s going to solve this, he’s going to find out what’s been going on. Sirius’ world has narrowed to the pursuit of justice, and he knows that, and he doesn’t care.

And he has Rolanda. She understands. She understands. They’re fine.

Rolanda wanders the flat muttering about Obscuruses and prophecies, and Sirius maps attacks, and reads the same copies of the Daily Prophet so many times that he owls off for replacements for the ones that tear and split. Their theories diverge. She’s focused on that, and he wonders if the Ministry has a point. 

“How did you know I’d gone to James’?” he asks her.

“Where else would you have been? He was your best friend.” Her hair is piled haphazardly on the top of her head, clipped up there with something sparkling, totally at odds with the rest of her dishevelled look. He doesn’t think he looks much better.

“He is,” Sirius corrects her. “He is my best friend.”

“He’s dead.” 

“Murdered.” Words are important. “He was murdered.”

“Killed. Obscuruses can’t murder.”

“There isn’t a fucking Obscurus!” he shouts, dropping the book he was holding. He tries for calm, he tries his hardest, but nothing happens. “There’s nothing! This is just what they said it is - the Death Eaters, the Order, all of it! It’s people, it’s just people, trying to restart a war that doesn’t exist any more!”

“No!” She looks like she’s going to hex him, or worse. Every part of her crackles with some unseen power, the image of the electric shock in his Muggle Studies textbook, a spell gone wrong. “No! There’s something else, we’ve been talking about it for months, there has to be something else! It can’t just be that!”

“Why not?” he asks. He lowers his voice. He tries not to shout, tries for calming and quiet, tries for descalation of a situation that’s already going out of control. “Why can’t it be?”

“There’s a prophecy! There’s something else. The smoke rising and the man rising. The end of days comes. The end of the Dark Lord and the end of the man who fights him. A smoke will rise and a man with it, and they will be what defeats the world. There’s a prophecy!” Rolanda tenses, her hands covering her face, as she bends at the knees like she’s going to fall to the floor. Sirius starts forwards, but something’s pushing him backwards. He retreats into the wall, hands raised in front of him, non-threatening.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. We can do this. We can work this out. I promise, Rolanda, I promise, we’ll work it all out. We’ll make it right.”

“The smoke rises,” she says, and her hands drop from her face, and her eyes have gone dark, and Sirius has no idea what to do next.

It goes as soon as it happens, and she flies into his arms. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, as they cling to one another in the centre of the room. “I’m sorry, I didn’t, I can’t, I don’t know, Sirius, I don’t know what we do. I don’t know if we can end this.”

Neither does he.

He does something stupid. He breaks into the Hall of Prophecy at the Ministry. He crosses the room with the Veil, and it calls to him, but he goes on. He makes it to the Hall, and he searches, and he finds a prophecy. Somehow he can pull it from the shelves. He listens, in the darkened hall, lit by thousands of globes of stories that may come true.

_“The end of days comes. The end of the Dark Lord and the end of the man who fights him. A smoke will rise and a man with it, and they will be what defeats the world.”_

He doesn’t know what it means.

Remus lends him a book, several books, more books than any reputable person needs, and Sirius reads everything he can get his hands on about prophecy, and it still doesn’t make sense.

“If this is just to get a girl,” Remus says, half-laughing, and Remus doesn’t get this. Remus doesn’t get any of this. So Sirius says nothing. He says nothing to Sirius, and he says nothing to Rolanda, and he certainly says nothing to Peter, who’s disappeared. 

Peter’s disappeared.

Sirius goes to his house, and it’s a disaster.

Sirius doesn’t understand.

His alarms trip as he’s poking around Peter’s cottage, and he’s gone in seconds, reappearing in the familiar swirls of smoke and dust and fog. Somehow, this time, he finds his way through to the centre of it. He’s expecting - what’s he expecting? Death Eaters. Something like that.

He finds her.

Sirius screams her name, and she turns, her hair flowing outwards, beautiful hair that’s so soft, that he wants to touch.

“Sirius,” she says.

“Rolanda!”

She can hear him, he knows she can. She’s facing him, and she’s at the centre of all of this. The smoke rises around her, spins around her in a perfect storm of which she’s the centre. 

“Rolanda!” he screams, again. 

“Sirius,” she calls, but her voice is weaker this time. It shakes and quivers, and she’s almost standing curled in on herself, like she’s trying to keep her body intact. “Sirius.”

Screaming her name won’t do anything. He has to get closer. He has to do something.

Her eyes flash dark, and she screams.

“I love you,” he says, and it isn’t a shout. If it’s going to help, she’ll hear it, anyway.

And if she doesn’t, Sirius doesn’t know what he’s going to to next.

—

That’s where it ends. I wonder if you thought this was going to be a story of hope. I wonder if you thought that this was the sort of story where all goes well for our heroes, where they go home and get married, where they make it through unscarred and intact.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

You see, it’s difficult for you humans to win.


End file.
